NICE idea

Dr. Richard Dawkins, who regards President Bush and Prime Minister Blair as "war criminals", does not believe that Saddam Hussein should have been executed. That, he asserts, is far too uncivilised and that the late genocidal dictator's life should have been spared. Not, mind you, so he could spend his days in a cell, but rather to be poked and prodded by psychologists and sociologists ad nauseum as a prime speciman of the genus dicator.

This sort of "mercy" makes me immensely glad that I'm an uncivilised proponent of the hanging. At least, unlike Dr. Dawkins, I was willing to regard Saddam as a truly evil man, but a man none the less, to be merely hanged and leaving his ultimate fate to God's judgement. I was pleased to see Saddam go to the gallows and was not bothered in the least that some of the people that he'd oppressed and terrorised for over a generation taunted him as they placed the noose around his neck, but I draw the line at the sort of "humaneness" that Dr. Dawkins advocates that would have reduced him to the status of a lab rat to be experimented on and "treated" endlessly in a fashion that would have made a Borgia blanch.

C. S. Lewis, please call your service.